Good Friday: Not with a Whimper, but with a Bang

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-26 OR Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

I'm writing this at the end of Good Friday, after the service I attended to hear, again, the Seven Last Words and reflections on them. I did not understand much of the latter, as the service was in Tagalog and my skills in that language are lacking. I did, however, resonate with the Seventh Last Word, "Tapos na!" "It is finished." This is a triumphant shout, not a cry of defeat.

I do not remember who wrote the lines, but I am always struck by

This is how the world ends,
this is how the world ends,
this is how the world ends,
not with a bang, but with a whimper.

But, instead, the world of Jesus the human, God become human and living among us in the world (he came to his own, but the world received him not) ended with a bang and not with a whimper. The Lamb left the world, crucified by the Romans at the instigation of the Jews, but as a Lion. And thus ended and began the greatest story the world has ever known. There is neither more nor less that needs to be said about that. Tapos na! was a cry of victory, that what Jesus came to do was accomplished.

One of my favorite "Jesus films" is The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie which got the evangelical community in the USA up in arms when it was released, in part for its depiction of Jesus imagining--as it turns out, with the help of Satan--living a life as a man, including being married first to Mary Magadalene and then to Mary and Martha of Bethany, begetting several children by the latter. With the exception of this and one or two other years, I have watched this movie either on Good Friday or Silent Saturday every year. At the end of the film and the novel, Jesus, having been returned to the Cross, shouts "It is accomplished!" What is meant by this line in Nikos Kazantzakis' novel and Martin Scorsese's film is that, in the words of George Orwell, Jesus "had won the victory over himself." Jesus had finally overcome the doubts that beset him throughout his career as "Not just a man, but the Son of Man, and more than that, the Son of God, and more than that, God."

The novel and the film explore in depth the human side of Jesus, which too often we miss in our proclamation. Unfortunately, some preaching about Jesus tends to be functionally Docetic. All of the Christological heresies agreed with orthodoxy that Jesus was God, but their disagreements and, ultimately, in the eyes of the Church, errors were constituted by various ways of denying that Jesus actually became human. So, for Kazantzakis, Tapos na! meant that Jesus became what he always was. This is precisely, I think, what we should be confessing about Jesus. On the one hand, Jesus' resurrection made him become, in the eyes of his disciples, what he always had been. But, on the other hand, in accepting his mission, and refusing the last temptation--which was to come down from the Cross, live and die as a man--he became in his own eyes what he had always been. And, in so doing, he also said, "It is finished!" to the old way of human life, living in bondage to the law of sin and death. By his death on the Cross, Jesus overcame sin's ultimate weapon. By his resurrection, Jesus overcame death's ultimate weapon. Tapos na! Amen.